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Child Welfare Books
Showing 1-50 of 752
Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Audiobook)
by (shelved 8 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.53 — 723 ratings — published
Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Paperback)
by (shelved 8 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.35 — 324 ratings — published
To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 7 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.02 — 3,557 ratings — published 2013
We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.29 — 9,472 ratings — published 2023
The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (Paperback)
by (shelved 6 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.16 — 497 ratings — published 2001
Turning Stones: My Days and Nights with Children at Risk (Paperback)
by (shelved 6 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.12 — 890 ratings — published 1996
A Child Called "It" (Dave Pelzer, #1)
by (shelved 5 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.14 — 467,378 ratings — published 1995
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook (Hardcover)
by (shelved 5 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.58 — 44,394 ratings — published 2007
"When the Welfare People Come": Race and Class in the US Child Protection System (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.00 — 114 ratings — published
The Glass Castle (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.33 — 1,409,455 ratings — published 2005
The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption (Hardcover)
by (shelved 4 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 3.60 — 3,260 ratings — published 2009
Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.10 — 67 ratings — published 2012
Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.38 — 1,810 ratings — published 2025
Stranger Care (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 3 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.24 — 2,755 ratings — published 2021
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.33 — 308,839 ratings — published 2014
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.21 — 91,054 ratings — published 1997
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.22 — 1,492,320 ratings — published 2017
Educated (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.46 — 1,970,638 ratings — published 2018
The Language of Flowers (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.10 — 236,670 ratings — published 2011
Three Little Words (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.20 — 17,892 ratings — published 2008
Push (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 3.88 — 60,567 ratings — published 1996
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.22 — 8,855 ratings — published 2025
The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 3.70 — 121 ratings — published 2025
No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.18 — 986 ratings — published 1996
Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.16 — 6,500 ratings — published 2024
Demon Copperhead (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.46 — 901,147 ratings — published 2022
Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System: The Case for Abolition (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.20 — 25 ratings — published
Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.41 — 704 ratings — published
Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.33 — 1,561 ratings — published 2024
Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services―Notes of a Former Caseworker – A Groundbreaking Investigation of Systemic Racism in Foster Care and Black Families (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.19 — 582 ratings — published 2024
A Place Called Home (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.62 — 4,381 ratings — published 2022
The House in the Cerulean Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #1)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.35 — 1,100,493 ratings — published 2020
Keep the Doors Open: Lessons Learned from a Year of Foster Parenting (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.41 — 564 ratings — published
Separated: Inside An American Tragedy (ebook)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.18 — 2,837 ratings — published 2020
Working with Adoptive Parents: Research, Theory, and Therapeutic Interventions (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 5.00 — 3 ratings — published 2013
Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.25 — 237 ratings — published 2011
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.70 — 20,310 ratings — published 2021
Little Fires Everywhere (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.06 — 1,352,512 ratings — published 2017
What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.40 — 115,512 ratings — published 2021
Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.34 — 6,882 ratings — published 2016
News of the World (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.08 — 114,804 ratings — published 2016
My Side of the Mountain (Mountain, #1)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.11 — 87,971 ratings — published 1959
The Tiger's Child: What Ever Happened to Sheila? – A Teacher's True Story: The Sequel About a Silent Girl's Transformation (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.07 — 6,727 ratings — published 1995
The Children Money Can Buy: Stories from the Frontlines of Foster Care and Adoption (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 3.63 — 125 ratings — published
The Primal Wound: Understanding The Adopted Child (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.05 — 1,892 ratings — published 1993
Taking Children: A History of American Terror (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.13 — 138 ratings — published 2020
Garbage Bag Suitcase: A Memoir (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.07 — 1,070 ratings — published 2016
The Book of David: How Preserving Families Can Cost Children's Lives (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 3.65 — 60 ratings — published 1996
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.29 — 249,500 ratings — published 2012
Before We Were Yours (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as child-welfare)
avg rating 4.40 — 759,009 ratings — published 2017
“It is inappropriate to call child protection "care" when experiences of the system are not "care"-like for everyone. "Care" essentializes the softening of a system that has a violent colonial history of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and has continued to feed its children into pipelines of homelessness and housing instability, poverty, prison and other problematic and violent systems. It fails to acknowledge that it is a system, one of which is plagued with the overrepresentation of Indigenous and Black children and families, a system built on white colonial racist values. "Care" as a word minimizes and erases the inequitable realities children, young people, families, and communities face across, not only the province of Ontario, but across the Nation. Child Protection System.”
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“If you come from privilege,' she explained, 'and you respect money and power, and the people in your court don't have any of that- it's unconcious and sometimes concious racism and classism.”
― We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
― We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
